inewsource has been investigating management and contract issues at NCTD since February, and the audit validates its key findings: the transportation agency isn’t effectively monitoring its contractors, and the effects are trickling down to San Diego passengers and taxpayers.

Throughout inewsource’s ongoing investigation, Katz was one of the few high-ranking transit agency officials willing to speak on the record about NCTD and its CEO. Other transportation managers interviewed asked not to be quoted by name due to the transit field’s “small world” atmosphere.

“It’s hard to believe,” Katz said, “that the board [of North County] is aware of all the things that this audit pointed out.”

“If my board had seen something like this,” he said, “they’d be making changes all over the place.”

This despite the fact that the guards are the first line of defense for NCTD’s rail lines — the southernmost portion of the second-busiest rail corridor in the country and a target for terrorism. With tracks passing by water-treatment facilities, a marine base, and residential and industrial areas, NCTD’s COASTER train carries armed men who admit they wouldn’t know what to do if one blew up or derailed.

“You read this thing,” Katz said of the report, “and it just keeps going and going.”

He added, “How do you not monitor [contracts] for contract compliance? How do you know if you’re getting your money’s worth?… Who’s watching this stuff? And who allows it if they know about it? If the CEO doesn’t know about it — they should.”

Katz has spent years working alongside NCTD, since Southern California transit agencies must work together constantly when it comes to planning and service.

Katz concluded, “The lack of consistency, the lack of oversight — let alone sitting on this [report] for eight months — it makes you wonder how they’re operating the railroad. They should have seen this audit and said, ‘Oh my god, this is not acceptable, and it’s got to be fixed today.”

“We would have fired people who had sat on this for eight months,” he said.

Katz believes many of the agency’s managerial decisions over the last few years have been “not only financially suspect,” but have “created a potential for serious safety issues” that concern him and his “entire Board.”